Waiters Stole Credit Card Info, Made $3 Million In Fraudulent Purchases:
The diners didn’t know it, but their credit cards were going to pay for more than their meals, prosecutors said. Waiters in about 40 restaurants, in New York and elsewhere, quietly recorded customers’ credit card information and passed it on to people who used the information to make more than $3 million worth of worth of illegal purchases.

And people are still scared about putting their credit card info on the web …

Your cell phone is so money: By next year, you’ll be able to pay simply by swiping your cell phone a few inches from a cash register, with a new wireless standard called Near Field Communication. CNN reports.

“An NFC chip in your phone will send your credit-card number — stored on your phone or on the chip — by way of short-distance radio waves.

An electronic reader at the checkout will decode the number and ring up your purchase.

You don’t even have to buy a new phone. When it hits stores next spring, the miniSD-card-size adapter from SanDisk can add NFC to any smartphone with a Symbian operating system when it hits stores next spring.

The first pay-by-phone option should roll out later this year, with more applications to follow.”

“It’s like a more direct, more primitive e-Bay, a phone-based equivalent of newspaper classified advertisements. The concept was developed at the MIT Media Lab.

The service will enable sellers to list details of their products, produce or even services in a database while buyers can look for any of this information through SMS. It will not handle transactions, but will simply put buyers and sellers in contact with each other via mobile phone.

… For countries like bangladesh, where the transport infrastructure is often poor, electronic commerce could prove to have even greater appeal, than in developed ones. “